Genre

• Responding to literature does not have to be intimidating if you read carefully and critically.
  
  
• The critical reading skills that you bring to reading short stories, poems, novels, plays, as well as non-fiction, are the same types of critical reading strategies that serve you well in any other type of reading that you do - whether it be reading a computer manual, a biology text, a legal document, or the like.

Readers complete the writer's work, bringing their own life experiences and ideas to it to make meaning.

Literary analysis is a genre that in many ways resembles an argument: you make a claim about the work and support your claim with evidence from the text as well as reasoning and analysis.

The purpose of a response to literature is to persuade the readers that your analysis and interpretation of the work are valid, reasonable, and logical.

When you write about literature, you participate actively in the construction of knowledge about the text.

That is to say, the text itself creates only part of its message.

Unlike "hard sciences," literature cannot be empirically tested in the laboratory; its meaning comes from its readers.

In fact, literature begs for readers to read, react to, think about, and interpret the text.

Having engaged in those steps, the process continues with another step:

communicating to others the meaning you, as a reader, have constructed from the text.

Your interpretation and analysis, add to the body of meaning about the text.